Before embarking on a complex XML journey, I would investigate the native abilities of the editing software. Most decent word processors have capabilities for flexible references (with page #s that float with the target text). Next, I would search for a format-specific after market tool.
If that doesn't pan out, I would just go to PDF. If you need to distribute only changed pages, you may find there are PDF tools available even if there are none specific to the original format. There is a big market in PDF publishing and redaction tools.
A more narrowly focused search for tools will result in a much easier and less expensive tool adoption and deployment. Not sexy, though.
take it easy,
Charles Reitzel
At 10:27 AM 12/6/2002 -0600, Austin, Darrel wrote:
One bit of content we are planning on disseminating via a CMS has an unusual restriction: the pagination must be preserved.
These are documents that ultimately need to be searchable, viewable, parsable, but also retain a specic pagination scheme for proper citations. For instance, the document, itself, may cite another page of the document, and other documents need to cite specific pages of other documents.
The easy solution is to just publish them as PDFs, but that just doesn't seem to be the elegant solution in my mind. Is there way to store structured content in a way that also retains the page structure of the original typed paper document? Or would PDF be the way to go?
-Darrel
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